


Get Them Drunk on Rose Water

by deathwailart



Category: Original Work
Genre: Angels, Body Horror, Fallen Angels, Nephilim, Other, Prophets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-06
Updated: 2015-01-06
Packaged: 2018-03-06 10:48:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3131744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Guardian angels and how they are not meant to love</p>
            </blockquote>





	Get Them Drunk on Rose Water

"I should not love you like this," you whisper against the cupid's bow (cherubim, you know where the stories come from but a cherubim would wield their bow with so much more intent) of her mouth. The gloss slicked across her lips is tacky like the blood you remember from (is it decades? Centuries? Was there even time then?) the battlefield. It is sickly sweet, not like the metallic tang that once clung to your lips and all your sharp and numerous teeth, frothing up when you coughed.  
  
"Were you not commanded to love us?" She asks, her hair wild, sweat-slicked curls and tangles stuck to flushed cheeks. You could break her. She is a soft small thing, she is blood barely held in her body, while you struggle to fit all of yourself into this fashioned skin. You wonder what she would look like after in those wonderful and terrible moments when she sleeps in your arms as you think of the ones who lay with daughters (and sons, the stories do not remember that, they remember things so badly and yet you love them, not as you love her, but you love them all the same) of men and birthed something other, something that does not belong to either world. You wonder if she would look as she does now, sweaty and flushed or would there be nothing left of her. Your kind were not made to love hers like this, one of you will not survive it. You like to think that she would look as she does tonight, wild unbridled joy from dancing, spinning and swaying, lost in a music all her own. There is more than one way to be drunk.  
  
"Not like this," you reply at last because she knows what it would be, idolatry and sacrilege at once. Your wings settle around both of you as she shivers and wipes her face, black and glitter smearing. You think of how you and your siblings once painted yourselves for war, blood and mud and tears, picked out all your extra eyes, made your mouths and all their many teeth seem larger and sharper. You had many heads then, you painted them all. You painted words and symbols on one another then as you do now, _love protection devotion_ at the nape of her neck, gathering her hair in one hand and she is so tiny, your real self could snap her neck with even the smallest and weakest hand. You cannot meet her eyes.  
  
You were made to love but not like this. And not her. Never her.  


* * *

  
Her walls are a riot of colour, words and symbols forgotten and not yet dreamt of amidst wild splashes of paint smeared by her hands when words fail her. You remember when such colours frightened you. You knew every shade of red and brown, gold and grey and silver. You knew a black darker than anything mankind knows of. White scared you, the white linen of bandages made you hiss, the white glint of bone made you howl as you pressed it back into place and you had never seen your own smile without a coat of blood.  
  
You never saw the Garden. You never saw the colours of life until you came down here to watch this girl child, to watch her grow into a woman. You have set a hand upon her shoulder, wiped away tears, applied coloured plasters to her knees. You read stories and played and declined to share a worm with her when she was six and dared you. You have been her sword and shield against the wicked things that come for her, that want to drag her down and drink the marrow from her bones or to fill her mind and heart with black thoughts, to pour tar into her soul and you have come to her with blood and tears and a clenched grimace of agony. She had soft hands, she would set them upon yours and wrest the sword from you, would pluck the damaged feathers out and she sang with a voice not hers, that perfect voice of legions, reminding you of all the hymns you sang and never understood on the battlefield and after, when you choked on the salt of your tears for a change. She showed a glass pyramid once, when you had hissed at the white walls of her home, angling it to let the light spill out, a brilliant rainbow across the wall and she explained it to you, patiently, indulgent the way you had been as a shield  
  
She paints and sings in dead languages and sometimes she is wild like she's been dancing or drinking, her words twist together and only you can keep up when you write because she can't, dictating her words, your wrists and knuckles aching. She stares unseeing so far beyond and you want to ask what she sees, if she sees your brother and sisters, if she sees your father. She is meant to deliver his word after all but you cannot ask, it is not your place but you know if she did that she would tell you, she has that power and for all that she is fragile and the span of her life is a blink of your many eyes, it is something you won't ever have.  
  
You are afraid. You are in awe. You do not know what you fear or why (except you do and it is her and the love you feel for her, a love you do not know what to do with.) You do not know who to ask for help because father set down his commands but father is gone, he does not speak and you have not seen your brothers and sisters since you were tasked with guarding this girl. It is not so long, her life is a whisper of a sigh through all the long ages you have lived but your solitary vigil is so quiet and there is no one else to turn to.  
  
After all, you have never met another of your kind but you know the stories all too well.  


* * *

  
"I should not love you like this," you tell her when she is bare before you, tattoos she designed and mostly applied herself telling a story you know because it hers and yours.  
  
"Were you not commanded to love us?" She asks and fits her mouth to yours, sweet and terrible and you are so gentle with her, you can hardly dare to touch this thing but she bites and scratches and somehow manages to knock you back so she is above you. She is more beautiful than you thought she would be, she is flushed pink and red, she laughs and moans and sighs more beautifully than she has ever sung and you are enraptured.  
  
When it is over and she lies curled in your arms, small and soft and fragile again, you weep and the word they have for you burns without it ever leaving your mouth.  


* * *

  
In the end, neither of you were made to love the other.  


* * *

  
You shrink. You fit in this skin that is yours now and you recall the story about the mermaid who wished for legs, who walked every step in agony. Your wings trail behind you, rotting where no one can see, the feathers fall out and maybe one day they will fall off entirely or will remain as bones that are twisted into a new shape each morning when you wake. Her mother is gone, she shrank with you as the child grew and you wonder if this was why the others left, what happened to all the other nephilim (you do not want to call her that, you remember all those cruel and awful stories, but that is what she is and one day she must know it) and to the ones their parents fell for. There was blood and you wanted to curse yourself and her and the thing that tore her apart (she was meant for words not for this, not for you, never for you, you were not meant to love her like) and she was gone, she would never have to know and you never wanted any of this.  
  
But there is a little thing that needs you and she is small and soft and fragile in your arms. She has wings and many eyes and you think you saw a glint of teeth, she has scales and her cries make the windows of your home quiver. She would have loved her but she can't, not here. So you will instead, you will love her as you are meant to even if you don't know how to go about that exactly, you will love her because that is what you were made for.

**Author's Note:**

> Also available in [tumblr flavour](http://harpymob.tumblr.com/post/107241666177/get-them-drunk-on-rose-water)


End file.
